Israelis and Palestinians often parade the images of slain or maimed children in their campaign to portray the other side and themselves as villain and victim, respectively.
For Palestinians, a searing image of the intifada was live footage of the fatal shooting in 2000 of Mohammed Dura, a 12-year-old Palestinian who crouched in fear behind his father during a shootout between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian police. The boy immediately became a powerful symbol for the Palestinians, with his face plastered on posters all over the Arab world.
For Israelis, the funerals of babies and young children who are victims of Palestinian suicide bombers have become almost routine on Israeli and international news.
Each side is skeptical of the other's accounts.
On Thursday, Mahmoud Aloul, the governor of Nablus, said the bomb scare and subsequent publicity could be the work of Israeli intelligence, perhaps in preparation for an attack on his city.
"They have been focusing on Nablus for weeks, so maybe they are preparing a major attack," he said. "Also, how do you explain that the Israelis had the press present and closed the checkpoint one hour earlier?"
Ghassan Khatib, the Palestinian Authority labor minister who coedits a joint Palestinian-Israeli website, said the images of the would-be bomber were a public relations blow to the Palestinian cause. "This is a gift from God to the Israelis and their propaganda activities at this point in time," he said, noting the widespread condemnation of Israel's assassination Monday of Yassin in Gaza City.
Nachman Shai, a former spokesman for the Israeli military, said Israel has had to fight a public-relations war to counter what he said was a shift in the world's perception of Israel in the last two decades.
Israel was once mainly seen as a small and embattled nation amid a sea of hostile Arab countries, but peace treaties with some of those neighbors had narrowed the focus of world attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said. And in this context, Israel was no longer the underdog.
The shock of seeing a boy sent to kill Israelis with a bomb knocked the Yassin story from its lead position in the Israeli media and might have won back sympathy abroad.
But Shai said that in this conflict, success in the battle for world opinion wasn't measured in a week.
"It's a long battle," he said. "It's going to go 15 rounds. There are no knockouts, just points."
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Special correspondent Samir Zedan in Nablus contributed to this report.
